Although it isn’t really clear what happens at the start (you can see it more clearly from the middle of the video) the idea behind this machine is that a ball in the physical world rolls into the computer, is transmorgified into a new ball, which is then spit out of the computer to start the journey anew. Twenty-Seven people made the machine work through 9 computers.
Thanks to the Scratch Ed team for organizing the workshop and giving us that one last opportunity to make it all work together! Some say process is more important than product, but there is an undeniable feeling of exquisite joy when, after holding your breath, the whole “product” works the way it is supposed to work.
Well, here I am at MIT meeting with teachers, students and members of ScratchEd and the Lifelong Kindergarten Group. First though, I have to say how beautiful Boston is. The old buildings, the friendly people and the river valley . . . wow! I am staying in the dorms at MIT and my room looks out over the Charles River . . . just absolutely inspiring!
Today I attended a pre-conference session at the MIT Media Lab. This hands on workshop was lead by members of the Scratch Team and involved us using WeDo sensors to create a long chain of events, where a ball in the real world would roll along and trigger a sensor which would then start events in a virtual Scratch world. The ball would change on the screen into a new ball as it traveled and when the new ball reached the end of the computer screen it would trigger a motor, thus sending a ball in the real world off to interact with the next group’s laptop. When the video of the final project video is online I will post a link. For now, here is a video of what you could see from where I was standing, which was not very much. It is enough to give you an idea about what was happening though.
You can’t really see it (on purpose) but I have built a Lego gate that opens up when the computer tells it too. Our end is really simple because it had to cross a gap from one side of the table to the other, so it is pretty much just an inclined plane, but the other side . . . . wow, complex. Trust me.
There were many interesting things that I learned from the activity. First, I need more Lego. You can never have enough.
I also loved how different groups used the supplies they were given. There was tape, balsa wood, cardboard boxes . . . so many different ways of moving the ball from one machine to the next.
There was minimal instruction given for the project, once people saw what was needed there was great collaboration. Some of the people at my table were from Japan and had very low English skills, but were still understood the goal and created an amazing contraption right before ours.
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From a teaching and learning standpoint, this activity was great on so many levels. There was an opportunity for such creativity, both in the physical world (some of the contraptions were wrapped in glittery beads) to the Lego world and then finally in the virtual world. It was easy to see how students who might not ordinarily choose to work with each other might understand the value of having a widely divergent set of skills. In addition, each group had to work carefully with the groups on either side of them. You had to receive the ball from one team and then hand off the ball to the next.
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When the final run happened, and went off flawlessly, it was very exciting. That feeling of accomplishment and the cheering when it worked on our last attempt was real!
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The next version of Scratch will have cloud variables. This means it is totally possible that you could partner up with classrooms, through video, all around the world and when my class’s project is finished it could trigger a digital online ball that traveled from one country, to another, in a giant Rube Golbergesque device that travels the school, all around the city, or even all around the world!
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Random thoughts . . . how much fun would it be to create an arcade like Chuck E Cheese has in the classroom. The basketball game could use the distance sensor to see if the ball went in the net, etc. Or how many different ways that a real world controller made from the distance sensor could be used as the mechanism for playing a digital game.
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More random thoughts. These little Lego Puppets can be controlled by the motor in the WeDo kit. If the motor moved the lips up and down, while Scratch played audio files, the digital puppets could put on a play or a show, similar to the animatronics that you see in museums. Again, using several computers and the cloud variables in Scratch, this could create some really interesting displays!
Little Old Me and a Video Game 